An Antiques Roadshow expert was left visibility uncomfortable after a guest triggered her ‘childhood fear’.
During the latest instalment of the BBC show, Judith Miller spoke to a guest about a 1700s tool that was once used by dentists.
She explained: ‘Now when I was growing up in the Scottish borders, I had an irrational fear of the dentist.’
‘And when I saw this today, it came rushing back. Tell me about this?’
The guest said: ‘Well this is a Georgian tooth key, it’s for extracting molar teeth.
An Antiques Roadshow expert was left visibility uncomfortable after a guest triggered her ‘childhood fear’
During the latest instalment of the BBC show, Judith Miller spoke to a guest about a 1700s tool that was once used by dentists
‘It’s the best, my dentist assures me. It actually belongs to a very good friend of mine and he assures me it’s what all the very best dentists were using in the mid 1700s.’
He then said she might be ‘interested’ to see how it works for herself, to which she awkwardly laughed and added: ‘I know what you’re going to do now.
During the demonstration, Judith looked uncomfortable, while the guest explained: ‘He’s been teaching me how to use this and the first thing you have to do is to make the patient say «ah».’
She laughed and responded: ‘Alright, OK, ah’, and even got the crowd involved.
The guest continued: ‘Right so ah, and then you pick it up and you insert it very gently like this and you sort of wind it round like this -‘
Judith interrupted, asking: ‘Is it going to make a noise?’, to which the guest confirmed it would squeak.
He proceeded to extract the fake tooth and said ‘And the patient collapses, but you can put it back in quite quickly and do it over again. It’s quite easy really.’
Judith then gave her expert opinion: ‘Well you know something, it’s absolutely Georgian, I would think 1760 to 1780 and it is what all the upmarket dentists would use.’
She estimated its value at £60 to £80 but playfully offered double to avoid being the device’s next victim.
She explained: ‘Now when I was growing up in the Scottish borders, I had an irrational fear of the dentist’
He then said she might be ‘interested’ to see how it works for herself, to which she awkwardly laughed and added: ‘I know what you’re going to do now’
It comes after one guest was left wide-eyed after he found out the value of a rare sculpture that he dug up in his garden.
Adam Schoon met with fellow BBC experts at the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral to value and assess all the weird and wonderful items.
And it wasn’t long before he was left amazed when he was faced with the ‘most unlikely item to ever appear on show’.
In amazement Adam said: ‘Well this is one of the most unlikely items to ever turn up at the Antiques Roadshow.
‘It’s a fragment of a piece of Hindu art and a very early one at that. Where did it come from?’
The guest explained: ‘I was digging in the back garden, we bought a house and it was very overgrown at the back.
‘There was loads of bramble and muck. I came across this, it was absolutely covered so I gave it a good clean -‘
Adam interrupted to ask: ‘What were you feeling, the more it was losing its mud, like a piece of archaeology?’
The owner of the piece added: ‘Yeah I suppose [I was] quite excited. And then we just left it by the fireplace and it’s got paint on it now, because it’s been an ornament in the house.’
He claimed he had ‘no idea’ why the 12th Century piece was in his garden but guessed that a former resident of his home must have ‘travelled around’.
Adam said: ‘I don’t know exactly but it leaves a mystery over the piece.
‘So let’s have a good look at it, because the most prominent surviving part of it is this huge lotus and next to it we have the earring of what would have been a large deity.
‘And because of the lotus, I think this must be Surya who is basically [the] sun god. ‘
An Antiques Roadshow guest was left wide-eyed after he found out the value of a rare sculpture that he dug up in his garden
In an upcoming episode, Adam Schoon met with fellow BBC experts at the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral to value and assess all the weird and wonderful items
And of course, the lotus comes up from the mud of a pond, as soon as it comes through the blackness and senses the sunlight, it blossoms.’
‘So you’ve got these lovely petal depictions, the earrings are exquisite and the chest of the figure just shows here, beautiful tresses of hair, wrapped jewels in them.
‘This is quite an important deity in the Hindu pantheon and flanking the figure are four lower relief figures, each one on its own little lotus base which of course agrees with the lotus sun theme.
‘But this figure survives pretty well and look at this, wielding an enormous sword so this is one of Surya’s guardian figures.’
When asked if it was a piece of religious artwork, Adam n said: ‘Yes it is, because this is the sun god, this would have been in a Hindu shrine and offerings would have been made to Surya on a daily basis so it’s a potent religious item.’
The expert concluded that the item was worth between £2,000 and £3,000.
Antiques Roadshow is available to watch on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
